In NYC's Election, a Learning Curve, Not a Pendulum Swing

Jim Sleeper lectures in political science at Yale and posts
frequently at TPM. He has been a New York newspaper columnist and is the
author of The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism. His website is www.jimsleeper.com.

Last week The New Republic resurrected from its archives and re-showcased a 20-year-old cover story, "The End of the Rainbow?," first published on the eve of Rudy Giuliani's election as mayor of New York in November, 1993.

That story heralded a new, but now two-decade-old, era of top-down,
high-capitalist, urban governance, emphasizing disciplined municipal
management over identity politics and federal aid. Now that kind of
governance is being challenged by elections such as the one on Tuesday
that will give New York's City Hall to left-liberal Democrat Bill De
Blasio after five terms of Giuliani and his successor Michael Bloomberg.

Now The New Republic has Michael Schaffer's perceptive piece on how De Blasio's election marks the end of the era whose beginning was marked by the "End of the Rainbow?" essay in 1993.

This is not a swing of the pendulum back to the "Rainbow" years. More
likely, it's a step up a steep learning curve of municipal governance, a
step as necessary as the one in 1993, when voters in New York but also
in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and other cities replaced
"Rainbow" mayors (most off them black) with centrist, "managerial" types
like Giuliani, most of them white - even as those electorates became
less white, not more. (To see who they were, read the 1993 story.)

Some such shift in governing philosophy and strategy was overdue.
Municipal politics had to transcend or at least temper the ethno-racial
"identity politics" that had produced more division than inclusion in
the endless scramble for municipal jobs and programs. "Rainbow" politics
had intensified over-reliance on federally funded social-welfare
policies by highly self-interested constituencies, including demagogic
racialist protest groups and less-than-noble municipal unions, that made
their livings off of patronage precisely as white ethno-racial groups
had always.

These complicated problems can prompt different but equally credible political positions. I've written about them at length and won't reprise them here.

But I do want to emphasize that although the new, centrist mayors of
the 1990s were right to insist on more managerial approaches, they
embraced too uncritically - indeed, kowtowed to - even-more powerful,
self-interested constituencies that were riding and channeling the
riptides of an increasingly casino-financed (literally and
figuratively), crony "corporate-welfarist," consumer-degrading political
economy.

The "managerial" mayors of the 1990s and early 2000's whose
municipalities rode those riptides with tighter rigging and
more-disciplined crews have done much good, strategically. But the
riptides themselves have become destructive of social stability and
civic dignity. The old "Rainbow" mayors' discredited practice of bending
over backwards to placate poverticians and promoters of a racial "riot
ideology" has been replaced by more recent mayors' "top-down" pandering
to brokers and predators whose own riots have thrown millions of
Americans out of their homes and jobs.

Throughout the 1990s, I argued
- and still insist, and have the body scars to show it - that liberal
governments must work closely with constituencies that hold even their
poorest members to the same elementary social standards and work ethic
that most people demand of their own children.

But that discipline must come from below along with credible
opportunity from above, and what's coming from above now in our
casino-financed, consumer-groping, crony capitalist regime is degrading.
It's because conservatives such as those at the Manhattan Institute
think thank cannot acknowledge this that they're losing.

Conservatives cannot reconcile their creditable calls for ordered,
republican liberty with their knee-jerk obeisance, under the banner of
"Free Markets," to the global financing and marketing juggernaut that's
dissolving American republican virtue and even sovereignty before their
very eyes.

By 2007, with the rise of the national-security state and the predatory economy, I argued here
that Giuliani should never be President, partly because his own
megalomania would be more dangerous with more power, but even more so
because lessons and methods that made tactical sense for cities would
(and already have) become truly oppressive in national governance.

The answer isn't to swing back to ethno-racial solidarities and Great
Society social-welfare programs that factored out discipline, sometimes
under banners of "group rights." Like Obama - who two days before his
election in 2008, went to Hawaii to pay a last visit to the white mother
of his white mother, DeBlasio has an interracial family, mooting the
kind of racialism that dominated too much "Rainbow" politics and worse.

I wish that the recently departed Rep. Major Owens of Brooklyn, whom I wrote about here last week, and
whose own family was and is interracial as De Blasio's - but who, in
his first House race in 1982, had to endure the taunts of a "blacker
than thou" opponent's accusation that "he talks black but sleeps white"
-- had lived to see De Blasio's election in his own hometown.

As the city's Public Advocate, De Blasio has also had ample
opportunity to learn the "good" lessons of Giuliani/Bloomberg governance
and to sift out the bad. Whether our national political economy will
really give him must room to strike better balances between public
engagement and private investment remains to be seen. He'll have to
climb a steep learning curve, not ride a pendulum swing back.